Yet many talk about innovation as a light bulb turning on, on an aha moment that strikes only the most brilliant of creators. But even the light bulb was invented simultaneously by 21 different people in different parts of the world. Edison might've gotten that final patent over the line, but the innovation of the light bulb was slow, cumulative, and inevitable. Innovation is not a singular eureka moment.
So what does it take to make an entirely new and useful thing out of things that already exist? How do we create a seismic shift out of things that were here before? We often talk about the waves of JavaScript frameworks, that single moment in time where a framework hits massive relevance. But we don't talk about what makes up a wave. Waves are not created on their own. They're created by a force of nature, the wind. And so today, as we talk about innovation in the industry, we're going to talk about the wind and the waves.
I'm Sarah Drasner, and today we're going to talk about the formation of framework waves from the epicenter. So who am I to talk about this stuff anyway? Back in the day I was a React developer. I keynoted React Rally in 2016 among some other conferences, and then eventually found Vue and became enamored with it, eventually becoming a Vue core team member. In September of last year, I took a director of engineering job at Google, including but not limited to the JavaScript and TypeScript languages, web testing, including Karma, and a few frameworks, one of which is Angular. I don't personally run the Angular team. You can think of me more like Angular's grandma. And although I'm going to focus a lot on Angular today, know that what I'm telling you, know that I can tell you the same story from the perspective of focus of a number frameworks, as the point is that we all do learn from one another. However, what I think is unique and intriguing about Angular is how well it survived. It's shaped and influenced multiple JavaScript waves in ways that I think few fully realize. And in turn, learns and grows and is continuing to grow from those around it. So basically, when I see other frameworks thriving, I feel very happy for them, too.
Which leads me to, how did we all get here? And how did Angular play a part? In order to see where it's going, it's helpful to learn from the past and where we came from. But I'll warn you, this is a contentious area, and people might not always agree on some of these points. Remember how I said that innovation was more like a network or a system than a single aha moment? And remember how I said that Angular and others have stood the test of time? Well, none of these frameworks were made from thin air. The first versions of Angular and AngularJS was one of the most modern JS frameworks, and it drew inspiration from its predecessors, Rails and JQuery. Neither of which I'd really categorize as a modern JS framework, as we know today. From there, we have Ember, also in this first wave, drawing inspiration from Rails as well. Handlebars, which Yehuda Katz worked on previously. And AngularJS spa capabilities. Then we have Backbone, learning also from Angular, but also MVP approaches. And Knockout, which learned from Handlebars in jQuery, introducing important concepts, such as in computed properties.
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